BEIRUT - The powerful Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah called on Hamas members and officials who are still present in Lebanon to leave the country 'immediately and within hours.' The decision comes as a response to the Palestinian Islamist movement’s role in the ongoing war in Syria against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Pick the Ontario politician who believes in democracy and the one who does not:

Ontario's Premier, who leads the province, not because she ever won a general election but because she was selected by delegates of the Liberal Party of Ontario, is prepared to "intervene if necessary" in Toronto's municipal affairs.

Embattled Mayor Rob Ford is the subject of unproven allegations of cocaine use by the Toronto Star.

Wynne, who lied about her government's corrupt use of public funds for political purposes related to gas plant cancellations, and is now accused of illegally trying to that cover up, should consider tendering her own resignation.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has said he is willing to put his leadership to the test by having an election.

Glorious Leader Wynne has capitulated to NDP demands in order to avoid facing Ontario's voters.

Between Ford and Wynne, which of the two actually has any democratic validity?

First they lied about him repeatedly. Then they tried, and failed, in every effort to prevent Rob Ford from winning Toronto's mayoral race in 2010. Since then, The Toronto Star has been relentless in its campaign to discredit Ford. What The Star's editors don't realize is that rather than discrediting Ford, they have managed to discredit themselves and have irreparably harmed the Toronto public's confidence in journalism in general.

If you were to believe what you read in The Star, the city is in chaos and goings-on at City Hall are in total disarray, all because of their allegations about Rob Ford having allegedly smoked crack cocaine.The Star is lying to you.

I was at City Hall myself on Tuesday. Other than the press acting like a gang of paparazzi, it's business as usual there. Permits are being issued as always, civic matters are being attended to as they have been before the recent media drummed-up outrage. At a meeting of the City's Executive Committee chaired by Ford which I attended, the mayor acted like a consummate professional. He was polite and effective, and not once was he jonesing for a hit of crack, despite any impression The Star might like you to have.

There was nothing resembling chaos.

Permits are being sold, municipal employees are doing their jobs, the sewers are running, street lights are working, the water is being purified, Council is dealing with public matters.

But were The Toronto Star to be believed, the world is falling apart, democracy should be suspended and a national emergency declared.

Yesterday an article published in The Star, they were adulating a Liberal politician they adore, who clearly appears to have been engaged in corruption in public affairs, in order to malign one whom they allege, without substantiation, has a personal problem.

Because The Star is more interested in undermining Rob Ford, whose values they detest, than they are in serving the public interest or telling the truth.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said Wednesday she would like to see Ford deal with his “personal” issues sooner rather than later, but shied away from saying the province was prepared to step in.

Evidently The Star reporters asked the Premier if the Province was prepared to step in to remove Ford as mayor.

"The Province was prepared to step in"?!??

On the basis of what? Toronto Mayor Ford has not even been charged with a crime, let alone been convicted of one. But The Toronto Star expects Kathleen Wynne to undo a democratic election based on unproven allegations from a media outlet with demonstratively malicious motives against Ford.

Clearly The Star's editors think their will supersedes trivial things like due process of law, democracy, and free elections.

Another Star article made the charge that Ford had illegally ordered emails of City staff to be destroyed. An article they had to quickly revise when it became public from other news outlets that Ford had not made any such request or attempt.

City spokesperson Jackie DeSouza says "I can confirm Mayor's Office did not ask the City to destroy records from any staff in their office"
— CP24 (@CP24) May 29, 2013

But The Star's rush to publish lies based on rumor, innuendo and unverified reports was irresistible when those lies were about Rob Ford.

Miserable, aggrieved, embittered and enraged, the grotty supporters of the anti-Israel fringe group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) were at Toronto's City Hall today. They were there to make the case that City Council should accept a City Manager's report that would not prohibit municipal funding for Toronto's Pride parade if their group participated.

The Executive Committee was packed with media this morning, not to report on issues related to Pride funding, but because it was the first time embattled Mayor Rob Ford was set to preside over a Council meeting since he had been accused of being in an as-of-yet unsubstantiated video in which he was alleged to have smoked something appearing to be crack cocaine. The media behaved more like paparazzi tacking George Clooney than municipal affairs reporters, but the circus atmosphere died down after a couple of hours.

Rob Ford at Tuesday's
Executive Committee meeting

Ford was in fine form, good humored and professional as always in his role of Executive Committee Chairperson. The day also happened to be Ford's 44th birthday and he seemed genuinely warmed by the felicitations he received for that.

The first speaker was someone named Carol Rawson who proceeded to provide definitions of apartheid and tried to link them to the Israeli state. Like most of the anti-Israel speakers who appeared, she seemed to lack basic insight into the situation involving the Israel and the Palestinians. Either that or she didn't comprehend the definitions she was reciting.

The definitions of apartheid she listed named discrimination on the basis of racial, ethnic and religious grounds, despite that in Israel, the issue actually has to do with nationality. Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Muslims and non-Jews have full citizenship rights, whereas Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza are not Israeli, so naturally do not enjoy those rights. If her idea of apartheid were the case, then the United States is also practicing apartheid against Mexico.

In speech after speech, it was blatantly obvious that Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and its supporters are little other than a collection of vapid, hateful, self-serving ideologues. They invent their own facts and lie outright about the situation affecting the Palestinians in Israel and the Middle East.

Describing the so-called "apartheid", one speaker spoke about "Jewish-only" roads in the Occupied West Bank. However no such roads exist. There are roads for Israeli citizens, which include non-Jews, and they were built following many deadly attacks on Israelis by Palestinians. Betraying the anti-Semitism they deny, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid's supporters frequently conflate Jews with Israelis and Zionists and that linkage is not only limited to within Israel.

There were speakers who took the floor to denounce the bigotry of the anti-Israel fanatics, the most poignant of whom were members of the Gay community. Martin Gladstone, a Toronto lawyer, was one of the first people to speak out about the divisiveness and hatred that Queers Against Israeli Apartheid brings to a Pride festival that is supposed to be an event which should be welcoming to all members of the Gay community. That point was powerfully reiterated by Dr. Paul Druzin, a physician who said that he does not want his "Gay tax dollars" to fund Pride if it includes a hate group like QuAIA.

An thoughtful, balanced speech was given by Hassan Maalbaki. He said that as a Gay, Muslim Arab, he wanted a better life for his Palestinian brothers and sisters, but he did not want his city to support a venue for the intolerance and discord among the Gay community promoted by Queers Against Israeli Apartheid.

I spoke to the Executive Committee as well, beginning by noting that the world isn't going to come to an end if Queers Against Israeli Apartheid participate in Pride. They are disingenuous hatemongers whose agenda is both transparent and unconvincing. But there were matters that others hadn't raised in detail which were worth addressing.

“when we adopt a partisan policy stance towards conflicts that are unresolved like Palestine and Israel when both Arabs/Muslims and Jews are Canadian citizens and deserve our 'equal' consideration, it is hard to be grateful or indeed hopeful. No! Immigrants do not owe their loyalty to Canada unquestioningly -- Canada needs to earn that loyalty..."

A report by such a clearly biased source would never be accepted by a court, nor should the City`s Executive accept it. I noted that the decision should fall to elected members of Council who were chosen by the citizens of Toronto to make such determinations. The issue isn`t whether "Israeli Apartheid" is hate speech, and it likely does not fit the legal definition as such. The issue is whether the city's elected representatives have the right to choose on behalf of Toronto's citizens not to pay for or be associated with a venue for a disgusting group of bigots like QuAIA.

I discussed the nature of the group, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid itself. The group masquerades as a "social justice" and a "human rights" group, but in fact they are nothing of the sort. The are, either by actual intent or by default, an anti-Semitic hate group. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that, "Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest. " Singling out Israel, Zionists and in so doing, most Jews for hate, is Queers Against Israeli Apartheid's sole purpose. If indeed they were concerned about the human rights of Palestinians, then they would speak out about the egregious human rights abuses faced by Palestinians in Lebanon, where they are denied citizenship, the right to own land or to be employed in dozens of occupations. Or they would speak out against the mistreatment of Palestinians that far exceeds anything perpetrated by Israel in places like Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and other Muslim countries. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid never discusses those violations of Palestinian human rights, because human rights is not really what their agenda is about.

The group is comprised and headed mainly by Marxists and anti-Capitalists. Its principal spokesman, Tim McCaskell, was a featured speaker at a Marxism conference held last weekend in Toronto. Marxists see Israel as a vulnerable, capitalist entity that is an ally of the great, evil epicenter of global capitalism, the USA. From their perspective, if Israel can be taken down, it strikes a blow against America and capitalism. If millions of Israeli Jews die and a brutal form of Sharia Law that represses women and executes Gays is imposed in its place, that would be of little concern to adherents to an ideology responsible for tens of millions of murders in the last century. But Human Rights is not their actual motive.

I observed for the Executive Committee that just because Jews are members of QuAIA, it no more precludes their being anti-Semitic than the fact that a handful of Jews collaborated with Nazi Germany precluded them from Jew hatred.

The issue of free speech was also not discussed in detail by anyone else and that was a critical aspect of the matter. QuAIA and its cronies make the deceitful argument that by attaching conditions to Pride's funding, their right to free speech is being taken away. Nothing could be more false.

Free speech is denied when the state prohibits it with sanctions and penalties. No one is depriving Queers Against Israeli Aparthied from publishing, saying, or spreading their message. The issue before council is a question of whether to fund it.

If I were to go to Council and ask for $200,000 to rent the Goodyear blimp to fly around the city and broadcast, "Richard Klagsbrun is a god and everyone should throw themselves at his feet," and got the response, "no, that's idiotic", I noted that using QuAIA's logic, I too would be deprived of free speech.

Of course free speech is not really what Queers Against Israeli Apartheid wants. They want tax-funded, subsidized speech so other people can pay for them to spread their vile poison.

Following my presentation, one of the QuAIA members took to the floor to speak, upset at what I had said. A wretched, weathered looking woman by the name of Anita Block proclaimed that she was offended at having been called a "Nazi collaborator." Her means of trying to justify that was by professing she was a "child of Holocaust survivors." She then had to clarify that her parents had left Europe in the 1930's prior to the actual Holocaust, which would not really make them 'Holocaust survivors.' But the Jews in the fanatical anti-Israel movement like to play that card whenever they can, not quite understanding it lends no validity to anything they say. It gives them no more credence than if a murderer used the excuse that being the child of a Holocaust survivor means that they could not possibly have committed a capital crime.

But there is a truly sad, pathetic component to Jews who have attached themselves to fanatics like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Many are what I call Munchausen Jews, who profess to be Jews almost exclusively for the purpose of demonizing the Jewish state, which also happens to be the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. Their desperate need for attention and approbation leads these Munchausen Jews to make fools of themselves while consorting with the most deplorable characters.

If Ms Block was more discerning, she might have noticed I did not call Jews like her Nazi collaborators, but only compared her to them. If I was going to identify a vicious, fascistic movement with which QuAIA was collaborating, it would be the monstrous totalitarians who worship the murderous ideology of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

An interesting episode followed at the Executive Committee. A Toronto woman gave an impassioned speech denouncing QuAIA's hypocrisy, in which she talked about the hate group "bitching" about free speech while they were actively engaged in trying to censor others. The woman used the phrase 'let's call a spade a spade' when identifying QuAIA as hateful bigots.

That speech provoked a remarkable response from Ward 9 Councillor Maria Augimeri. The Councillor, who is one of only a few who effectively stood up for the hateful term "Israeli Apartheid" by being one of just seven of Council's 42 members to vote against a motion last year to denounce it, took a seat allotted for visiting Council members at the Executive Committee.

Augimeri shouted into the microphone in front of her that she had a Point of Order. However Mayor Ford noted that she could not introduce it, as that was a privilege not accorded to visiting Councillors at the Committee.

It was a basic procedural matter that the Mayor was correct in noting. But acting like a petulant child throwing a temper tantrum, she kept shouting over the Mayor, who pleaded with her to follow the rules. Ford did not want to demean himself by getting in an argument with the near-hysterical Augimeri, who then spat into the microphone about being outraged that the "sexist" word bitching was being used by a deputant at the Executive Committee. Augimeri then denounced the phrase "calling a spade a spade" as racist to a small smattering of applause from the grubby QuAIA contingent in the room. Before anyone could respond, Augimeri stormed out of the room in a huff. The meeting then continued, ignoring the interruption as if Augimeri had never been there.

Had she remained, someone might have pointed out to the not-particularly-bright Councillor that if she were familiar with the etymology of "calling a spade a spade," she would have known it has no racist connotations whatsoever. The phrase originated in the mid 16th Century and was based on Nicholas Udall's translation of Erasmus. The quote comes from:

"Philippus aunswered, that the Macedonians wer feloes of no fyne witte in their termes but altogether grosse, clubbyshe, and rusticall, as they whiche had not the witte to calle a spade by any other name then a spade."

Another visiting Councillor, Kristyn Wong-Tam, came to the microphone to speak about the issue at hand. Being the original owner of the Queers Against Israeli Apartheid group's website, her bias would seem apparent. Wong-Tam dissembled about Pride being discriminated against for having to fulfil conditions that are not applied to any other recipient of City funds. She naturally neglected to mention that no other recipient is also consistently used as a platform to denounce an entire community within Toronto. But honesty and integrity are not features anyone has come to expect from QuAIA's supporters.

A few members of the Executive Committee stood out as bringing forceful reason to the debate, including Budget Chief Frank di Giorgio, and most particularly David Shiner and Norm Kelly. Shiner spoke about the realities in Israel that put the lie to the deceitful claim that Israel, which affords more democratic rights to the Palestinians than any Arab country, is an "apartheid state." Kelly expressed dismay that, as Gays are persecuted throughout the Middle East in every country but Israel, where they have equal rights, Pride's response was shocking. Kelly said Pride should be honoring the Jewish state rather than investing so much energy into demonizing it.

Yesterday's events reiterated the reality that Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are an unprincipled collection of detestable cretins who have managed to manipulate the spineless leadership of Pride. Along with them for the ride are a small handful of sordid City Councillors on the hard left.

A point I raised to the Executive Committee is that the City expects its elected officials to effectively represent how tax funds are spent. There are many important needs for which we haven't found the funds. Our roads are in a terrible state of disrepair and remain in need of fixing. There are homeless people living in our streets. Supporting Pride, should it do what it's supposed to, which is to honor and celebrate the contributions, inclusion of and participation of the Gay community within Toronto, would be an appropriate use of city funds. But if tax funds are handed over to a venue for Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to spew their poison, then it would be a gross abuse of the trust that citizens place in the hands of their representatives.

There are victims to QuAIA's spiteful activities, but not the ones they would prefer. QuAIA are a group of insignificant bigots and Israel will neither be hurt by nor likely even notice them.

In the end, the real victims of the QuAIA hatemongers are the taxpayers of Toronto, who have had to subsidize them and deal with their self-serving divisiveness for far too long.

...judging from the activities of Tuesday, I would say the rumours of Ford's demise are grossly exaggerated.

I would also say, judging from the Forum poll we ran in our newspaper Tuesday, his approval rating is still around 42%, just slightly down from the 44% he had earlier this month. That is despite the fact that 51% polled thought the video was authentic.

The latter finding was particularly interesting - namely that even if the mayor is proven to have some dealings with crack cocaine, there are people in this city who are prepared to cut him some slack and not have their perspective on the matter dictated by the Toronto Star.

An interesting aspect of the polling done for the Toronto Star concedes that, “..Ford Nation seems to be a pretty loyal group of supporters. Unless the issue deals directly with the performance of his duties, these things don’t seem to impact his popularity,” Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff said in an interview..Rob Ford is really both the Teflon and Kevlar Mayor – nothing sticks to him and nothing penetrates his armour.”

The Star report polls that the wife of late NDP leader Jack Layton would beat Ford if an election were held today with 56% of the vote.

However no campaign has begun and Olivia Chow is an incredibly vulnerable candidate outside of the downtown core that forms the basis of her support. Her speaking style is stilted and cold and her NDP-style policies would result in skyrocketing taxes and unions resuming their stranglehold on City Hall.

An informal poll of Ford supporters suggest they welcome the opportunity to face Chow and offer the voters of Toronto the choice between a fiscal conservative who has made huge strides in getting the city's fiscal house in order and an irresponsible spendthrift known for little else than being the widow of a famous politician.

On Wednesday the Senate agriculture committee approved a GOP proposal that would amend the farm bill the Senate is considering to ban “convicted murderers, rapists, and pedophiles” from getting food stamps. On its surface, the idea sounds unobjectionable, but the measure would have “strongly racially discriminatory effects,” according to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

Right now there's nothing but unproven allegations about a video two Toronto Star reporters and the editor of a scandal-mongering website claim to have seen that allegedly has someone who appears like, but may or may not be Toronto mayor Rob Ford appearing to smoke something which may or may not be crack cocaine.

Hardly the evidence necessary to undo the outcome of a democratic election in North America's 4th largest municipality.

But the plot thickens. Now reports are emerging that the owner of the alleged video has been rubbed out.

Michael Adebolajo, one of two men arrested over last week's attack in Woolwich, was detained by Kenyans for suspected extremist activity in 2010 and later deported back to Britain, the Foreign Office confirmed on Sunday.

Kenyan counter-terrorism police arrested Adebolajo after he allegedly attempted to join up with al-Shabaab Islamist militants in neighbouring Somalia. He appeared in court under a different name, Michael Olemendis Ndemolajo. The FCO said it had provided Adebolajo with "consular assistance" after he was held "as is normal for British nationals detained".

"Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, for better or worse, depending on how you feel, smoked hashish, and his son has smoked with me four or five times, so it really pisses me off when I see Justin Trudeau, who took big gaggers with me, is in parliament, actually voting for Bill C-15."

This
is the time for the West to take a stand, to severely disempower Hezbollah and
continue to shake up the Middle East. No response will be a signal
to Iran that they can continue their mischief...and worse.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The leader of the powerful Lebanese militant group Hezbollah decisively committed his followers on Saturday to an all-out battle in Syria to defeat the rebellion against PresidentBashar al-Assad. He said the organization, founded to defend Lebanon and fight Israel, was entering “a completely new phase,” sending troops abroad to protect its interests.

In the Stanley Kramer movie Inherit the Wind, the great dancer Gene Kelly, in a rare, strictly dramatic role, played a character named E.K. Hornbeck, based on the famous journalist H.L. Mencken. His character delivers a line in the movie that paraphrases another famous Chicago newspaperman named Finley Peter Dunne, whose work, like Mencken's, also straddled the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

The line is, "the job of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable."

In Toronto, Canada in 2013, the newspapers have taken on the exact opposite role. Rather than serving the interests of the public, they have become a bludgeon being wielded by a snobbish elite to crush the democratic will of a city's citizens.

From the time Rob Ford declared his candidacy as mayor in 2010, a media with the conceit that they were the intellectual tribunes of a progressive city pulled out every stop imaginable to prevent a man they considered too déclassé from becoming Toronto's chief executive. Let's leave aside for the moment that very few Toronto journalists come close to being intellectual or that progressive is a term that is in the eye of the beholder.
Trying to sway the public, The Toronto Star printed outright lies about Ford, including libelous accusations of him assaulting a minor. Its columnists went so far as to say, in essence, that only idiots would vote for Ford. Then, when Ford's support remained solid, The Star's editorial board tried to convince other mayoralty candidates to drop from the race and support their chosen banner-bearer, George Smitherman, a former drug-addict who had overseen the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money while provincial Health Minister.

The Star wasn't alone in its glaring contempt for Ford. Though generally more restrained than The Star, some writers at The Globe and Mail and some at the National Post put their dismay at the prospect of a Ford victory into print.

Despite all that, Ford handily won the election, and that stuck hard in the "progressive" media's craw for a pair of reasons. One is that media players like to think how influential they are, and the election was a fierce blast of cold water that woke them up to the falsehood of that presumption. More painful was the bitter shock that their sophisticated, urbane. "world class" city was going to be headed by a sweaty populist who actually was more interested in the opinions of the man-on-the-street than those of the sanctimonious editorialists at One Yonge Street.

Suddenly, the special interests of the arts community, the unions, and the social engineers were no more important than that of John Q. Public. As far as the media nabobs were concerned, that could not stand and no rules or standards would keep them from undoing it.

Rob Ford was stalked, harassed, bullied, libeled, defamed, and subjected to standards and scrutiny that no politician in the western hemisphere has ever faced before.

But none of that was intended to serve the public interest. It was only to feed the vanity and conceits of a hypocritical, self-obsessed media class and their cronies.

As a number of people have noted, The Toronto Star violated basic ethics and journalistic standards to spread a story about Rob Ford that is based on hearsay from thoroughly disreputable sources. Today The Globe and Mail did the same, dredging 30 years into the past of Ford's brother, Etobicoke Councilor Doug Ford.

And for whom?

The same media for years buried a report of Jack Layton's being caught by police during his visit to a hand-job parlour that occurred while he was married and a City Councilor. But he was a media darling, so they colluded to keep it quiet until the Toronto Sun finally published the story. And then journalists from The Star and others tried to discredit it or say it was not relevant.

There are worse stories then that about Jack Layton floating around regarding some of his activities in the 1980's and 1990's. But he has a family and it would not be in the public interest to publish them. What matters most about a public servant is how they serve the public. Like Ford, Layton had his personal failings, but like Ford, as far as his public service was concerned, he behaved honorably. But where the media turned a blind eye to Layton's foibles, Ford's are magnified into firestorms.

Much of Toronto's media is behaving like reprehensible hypocrites. What tales might emerge if one was to dig 30 years into the past of left-wing councillors like Adam Vaughan and Kristyn Wong-Tam, one wonders? We know what one finds when looking into the past of The Toronto Star's last anointed selection for mayor, George Smitherman, and it's worse than anything of which Rob Ford was ever accused. But Smitherman got a free pass from The Star because he represented their values, where Ford faces an onslaught because he is an affront to them.

Toronto's public elected Rob Ford to do a job, and Toronto's media has shown there is no depth to which they will not sink in order to undermine him and prevent him from doing it. But make no mistake about it, the interests The Toronto Star serves are not those of the average Toronto citizen.

Doug Ford says he and Mayor Rob Ford would be willing to step down and go to an election tomorrow. “Let the people be the judge and jury."
— CP24 (@CP24) May 25, 2013

Basically making the banal and morally vapid argument that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter,' The Guardian's columnist Glenn Greenwald wrote on Thursday that the horrific beheading of an off-duty soldier on the streets of London was not an act of terrorism.

Greenwald's reasoning boils down to his question: "Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism?"
The ramifications of the position taken in Greenwald's column are staggering if indeed he and more significantly, if Muslims living in the west genuinely believe it.

Employing a puerile moral equivalency, Greenwald maintains that "it's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade."

But there's a matter of major significance that Greenwald's thinking postulates. The terrorists who murdered Lee Rigby as he was innocently walking in the London suburb of Woolwich were converts to Islam of Nigerian origin. If they are not terrorists, if they are behaving the same way he says western nations do in Islamic countries, then on whose behalf were they acting? The west hasn't attacked Nigeria, nor were the Woolwich terrorists wearing Nigerian or any military uniforms.

Speaking of terrorism, Greenwald wrote, "the term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states."

By that logic, when US or UK soldiers launch attacks against the Taliban, or al Qaida, or during the wars against Iraq, if a Muslim is killed, then it is an attack against all Muslims.

Greenwald's position only makes sense if one holds the view that the west is in a war against all Muslims and more to the point, that the reverse is also true.

And if that's the case, if Glenn Greenwald is correct, then every single Muslim in the west is an enemy soldier walking among us, which gives western countries the right to deport or inter them in prison camps until the war is over.

Of course Greenwald is wrong. Like most moral relativists, he hasn't the capacity to think through the implications of the rhetorical contortions he distorted himself into while acting as an apologist for terrorism.

All Muslims are not at war with the west. The vast majority find the Woolwich terrorists as repugnant as anyone else.

Nor is the west at war with all Muslims. Neither western civilians nor military personnel living in Islamic states go around randomly killing Muslim soldiers or civilians for the sake of their being Muslim, nor is anyone in their right mind claiming they have such a right. If a Catholic is murdered by a Muslim terrorist, as often happens, the Pope does not give dispensations that allow the killing of any available Muslim in retaliation.

But this recent horror in Woolwich does highlight another aspect of the dilemma the west faces in dealing with its growing Muslim population.

The hearts of the vast majority of Britain’s three million Muslim citizens will have sunk on hearing the news of the Woolwich killing. The condemnations came quickly, yet many were also scratching their heads wondering how Britain’s Muslim majority could ever get their voices heard more powerfully than the dramatically newsworthy preachers of hate.

The "preachers of hate" to whom Katwala refers are embedded in many of England's and the west's mosques. Just as in the movie Trainspotting, his friends warily accepted the sociopathic villain Begbie, similarly many Muslims may find the Jihadist "preachers of hate' scary and deplorable, but tolerate them nonetheless because to their co-religionists, they are "one of us."

Until all western Muslims and the rest of us shun and ostracize the preachers of hate, be they in the mosques or on the editorial pages of The Guardian, then we will remain a long way from seeing the end of terrorism in our streets.

UPDATE: This post originally identified the Woolwich terrorists as Nigerian Muslims who had immigrated to England. Thanks to information from readers that has been corrected to "converts to Islam of Nigerian origin." Thank you to the readers of this blog and your comments are always welcome.

This week, at least part of his column shows uncharacteristic (for anyone at The Toronto Star) insight into some of the discord afflicting Toronto:

...If there’s any truism I cling to, it’s that: people don’t get the leaders they deserve. Why not? Because of all the haughty intervenors between the citizens and those who govern — they generally get the leaders they select, either sooner or later. Here I come to urban guru and U of T prof Richard Florida, who I do find embarrassing in this context, but also instructive. He wrote this week in the Globe and Mail: “It is time to convene a blue-ribbon commission on Toronto’s future . . . the top leaders of all of our key institutions must step up — our banks and corporations, schools and universities, labour unions, the city, the province, and more. No one can stand on the sidelines if we are going to forge the model of private-public partnership that is needed . . . ”

Thursday, May 23, 2013

TORONTO – A former political aide to mayoral candidate George Smitherman said Thursday that support is growing for Rob Ford amid allegations the mayor appears in a video smoking what appears to be crack cocaine.

Bruce Davis suggested the media is creating public sympathy for Ford by hounding him for answers.

“When I talk to people out there, they have a lot of sympathy for the mayor,” Davis said. “They don’t have a lot of sympathy for people interrupting a press conference, or challenging him in the Tim Hortons drive-thru. That doesn’t go with Canadians.”

A very good piece, though I think Jon misses one point. It`s not just keeping taxes down that makes Ford so appealing to his base, but his overall respect for and interest in his constituents, of which making sure taxes are spent appropriately is a critical, but not the sole part.

...In an essay, “The Professor of Parody,” renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum raised the issue of Butler’s style, calling it “ponderous and obscure” and “dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions…It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding.”

Most famously, in 1998, philosophy professor Denis Dutton’s journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Butler first prize in its “Bad Writing Competition,” which claims to “celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.” Butler received the award for this 94-word sentence that was published in the journal Diacritics:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

This time, The Guardian's sanctimonious nitwit, who is so egregious a terror-apologist that even Bill Maher has called him out for it, was making excuses for the savages who beheaded an off-duty soldier on the streets of London yesterday:

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.

Across Seattle, reports alt-weekly The Stranger, posters are appearing linking gay rights and gun rights in ways that are just freaking out the usual control-freaky suspects. Some of the posters suggest that disliking guns is just like disliking homosexuality: a personal foible that ought not be turned into legislation. Other posters suggest that armed gays "aren't going to take shit from homophobes." It's clearly inconceivable that anybody could actually hold in his or her mind, simultaneously, a regard for the right of people to love who they want and respect for the right of self-defense, so it must be some horrible, trollish plot.

Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm’s fearlessness. A fearlessness that made him seem cold, actually, though we know he wasn’t really. All that love of us that kept driving him to improve our lot; often into quite the wrong direction, but I need not go into that. What I was remembering was how he called our oppressors “blue eyed devils.” Now who could that have been? Well, we see them here in David Icke’s book as the descendants of the reptilian race that landed on our sweet planet the moment they could get a glimpse of it through the mist that used to cover it (before there was a moon). No kidding. Deep breath! Yes, before there was a moon! (Oh, I love the moon; can I keep it? Please?). Anyway, there they came, these space beings (we’re space beings too, of course, not to forget that). But they looked…. different than us. And they were.

The feeding frenzy continued over the weekend as the Star reportedly stalked the mayor’s family both in Etobicoke and up at their cottage, leaving the mayor’s mom absolutely beside herself.

I still remember how in 2009 when I dared suggest the former mayor David Miller trotted out his family for the first time (for show) during his resignation speech, I was beaten up by my detractors for days after. Not once did I stalk him at home or at the various eateries he was known to frequent, despite the many tips I received. The mere mention of Miller’s family was a travesty to the left.

It shouldn’t be far from the public’s mind that Councillor Ana Bailao was recently charged with a serious drinking and driving offence for which she lost her licence for six months.

That went away far too quickly and quietly — because it involved a leftist councillor.

But because it is Ford, it is all fair game, folks.

“There has been a double standard ... he’s had coverage and scrutiny no mayor has gotten so far,” says Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday. “The fight with the Toronto Star has just gotten out of hand.”

Alex of HollywoodLoser.com let me know about this movie that is so awful, it makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It's so horrendous, if someone had intentionally tried to make a bad movie, they probably wouldn't be able to make something nearly this dreadful. And of course, The Room now has a cult following.

From Alex:

The "best worst movie" ever made, The Room (2003)
plays its monthly date at the Royal Cinema (College west of Bathurst) [in Toronto] this
weekend. But this time before the movie will be a 20-minute Q&A period with
the film's writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau, and his co-star Greg Sestero,
both LIVE in person!

It's a rare opportunity to see this staggeringly
incompetent romantic melodrama -- part soap-opera, part sitcom, part softcore
-- in the bewildering presence of the International Man of Mystery (or, if you
prefer, the "half-drunk Croatian cyborg") who gave the world the immortal
words, "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!"